The chaplain was showing them over the asylum.
"How sweet of you, Mr. Pritchard, to show us everything!" said one of the girls. "It's awfully thrilling. I suppose we shall be quite safe from the violent ones?"
"Oh, yes," said the chaplain, "you will only see those from a distance; we keep them well locked up, I assure you."
The girls laughed with him.
The party went laughing through the long, spotless corridors, peeping into the bright, airy living-rooms, where bodies without brains were mumbling and singing to each other.
The imbecile who moved vacantly with slobbering lip, the dementia patient, the log-like, general paralytic—"G. P."—things which must be fed, the barred and dangerous maniac, they saw them all with pleasant thrills of horror, disgust, and sometimes with laughter.
"Oh, Grace, do look at that funny little fat one in the corner—the one with his tongue hanging out! Isn't he weird?"
"There's one actually reading! He must be only pretending!"
A young doctor joined them—a handsome Scotchman with pleasant manners.
For a time the lunatics were forgotten.